We estimate the returns (measured by hourly earnings) to education, experience, and social networking in India using individual-level panel data from the India Human Development Surveys. We combined the two latest waves of this survey using individual-level identifiers to generate a balanced panel and merged it with various household…

Gender disparity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in higher education is a matter of concern across the world. Expansion of the higher education sector in the early twenty-first century in India has enabled to bring attitudinal changes in Indian families especially towards females' STEM higher education. The present…

Conferences are key sites for the development of academic careers; however multiple studies have shown that conferences are exclusionary on the basis of gender and other axes of social disadvantage. This study focuses on India and as such also incorporates caste as an axis of privilege and disadvantage in relation to access to conferences.…

The Indian Government's 12th Five Year Plan features ambitious goals regarding the upskilling of women in India. While the Plan acknowledges Indian women's continued inequality, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) programmes (a main avenue for upskilling) pose considerable challenges. There is significant work to be done if…

This brief summarizes a case study that assessed the gendered impact of COVID-19 school closures on education, health, well-being, and protection of adolescents in India. Based on surveys and interviews in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, findings point to the digital divide for girls as well as shared barriers to effective remote learning. Informed by…

This paper examines leadership challenges in managing digital power and digital poverty, in the delivery of schooling during the Covid-19 emergency lockdown in India. The article suggests that although India is considered a global leader in digital technology, its primary and secondary school system suffers from digital poverty with associated…

Gallagher and Sahni elaborate on their decade-long collaboration, focussing here on their latest multi-sited ethnographic study, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014-2019) and the pedagogy and theatre work carried out at Prerna School for…

Brigham Young posits that 'If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but you educate a woman, you educate a nation.' Even now, educating a woman is challenging in cultural practices dominated by values and beliefs in the social system. Women in developing countries face significant barriers in accessing education, whereas gender inequality…

The Delhi government in India recently launched its preschool curriculum for the city's 10,897 communitybased preschool centers. The draft National Education Policy of India, made public in June 2019, dedicates its first chapter to the importance of early childhood care and education and the need to extend the right to education to every child who…

The paper seeks to expand our knowledge on the importance of public academic support programmes (ASPs) in higher education (HE) in India, which extend supplementary instruction with the aim to improve academic performance and support academic efforts of students from the socially and economically disadvantaged groups (SEDGs). This paper shows that…

Since 2003 a privately funded high school has provided desperately needed education for girls from impoverished families in Lucknow, the capital and largest city in Uttar Pradesh, in northeast India. Urvashi Sahni, the founder of Prerna Girls School, tells the stories of how the school has changed the lives of more than 5,000 girls and their…

Microfinance has been recognized globally as a poverty alleviating strategy and particularly as a gender equality enhancing approach. There have been immense, intense and nuanced debates in the field of international development, feminist studies and comparative social policy regarding the role of microfinance in addressing gendered poverty. This…

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields are considered catalysts for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Yet, particularly for STEM fields, girls and women, for a multitude of social, cultural and psychological reasons, engage and participate at a lower rate than boys and men. This research…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the educational systems to shift from traditional learning to flexible learning. Flexible learning is a combination of digital and non-digital technology that ensures the continuity of inclusive and accessible education in the form of online, offline, or blended modes of teaching and learning processes. This…

Both globally and in India, the discourse around girls' education is particularly charged. There is an urgency as it is now understood that developmental promises cannot be fulfilled unless gender equality is taken seriously. Generally, a complete, high-quality secondary school education for girls is seen as a vital pathway to achieving gender…